Editorial
The best bars for a Sunday afternoon in New York have a particular quality that is hard to define and easy to recognise when you are in one: the afternoon slows down, the drinks pace themselves, and the staff treat the Sunday crowd like they have nowhere else to be. We have spent enough Sunday afternoons field-testing across Manhattan and Brooklyn to know which bars have that quality and which ones are just technically open.
Brooklyn owns Sunday afternoons in New York. The beer garden tradition, the neighbourhood pub culture, and the general preference for outdoor drinking when the weather allows make it the better half of the city for this kind of afternoon. These picks represent the best of it.
Manhattan's Sunday afternoon bar scene requires a bit more navigation — the combination of brunch crowds in the early part of the day and the evening dinner rush means the ideal Sunday afternoon window (roughly 2pm to 6pm) is when the city is most at ease. These picks hit that window best.
For the Sunday afternoons where the agenda is a slower, more deliberate kind of drinking, New York's cocktail bars shift into a different gear on Sundays. The following picks are the best examples of that gear — serious programmes, unhurried service, and spaces that reward spending two or three hours at the bar.
The best Sunday afternoon bars in New York reward the decision to stay rather than move on. The common failure mode for Sunday drinking in the city is bar-hopping — moving too fast across too many places and ending up at 8pm in a bar that would have been better at 6pm if you had just stayed put. The picks on this list are all stay-put bars. Give any of them three or four hours and the afternoon will be better for it.
Brooklyn beats Manhattan for the outdoor Sunday session; Manhattan beats Brooklyn for the settled, interior version. Neither is wrong. Pick based on the weather and who you are with — the rest follows naturally.
James has been spending Sunday afternoons in New York bars for longer than he cares to calculate precisely. He is very sure about which Brooklyn beer gardens fill too early and which West Village bars are worth arriving late for.